Geez I haven't seen this book in forever! The memories this brings back. I remember getting this book about the same time I had gotten the Chrome Crusher set, the Rock Raiders game (currently playing in the background while my dudes grab some ore) and Lego Island... Such simpler times. Thanks for the throwback. If me getting Rock Raiders running again wasn't enough of a nostalgia overload
If you hadn't gotten to look through the book (PDF or original), I'd take a minute and peer through... It was chock full of some amazing stuff!
If I can find a pdf to share I'll try to get it on here for you all.

Oh man, that's so neat... if only I had a 3D printer
Yep, and it's pretty great! Can't remember how LDD was though but in stud.io you have tons of old parts, and even starting to get hose posing functionality, meaning you can actually make Chrome Chrusher with bent hoses by only making two connections and watching physics do its work! Maybe pull the sides a little to adjust, but it's like magic when in action. Chains also are posable. Although they still haven't made the smaller hoses for the Teleport Pad / Tool store bendable... but in a future update?
The rendering is also top notch, giving results like this at non-maximum quality:

Should be fine. IIRC at least Cafeteria v0.9.3 works on XP, haven't checked the newer version.
Also, this just in, Improvements Pack: in particular a WAD method which allows you to just replace two game files and bam, you're done and can launch!
Whatever you play (all of them? ), enjoy!

See topic for details and the Cafeteria version for more information. This will usually be updated after the Cafeteria version, and some things may be left out (although this is unlikely).
Contains both the files needed for the Data method and the WADs with which you can overwrite your existing LegoRR0.wad and LegoRR1.wad .

If anyone of you is using stud.io, they just launched the beta of a great plugin called Part Designer. Essentially it lets you create your own parts and customize the textures on those, and import them into stud.io easily. That means you can now e.g. make builds with the original Rock Raiders without hassle (If you get a hold of vector/png textures for these guys)
Feel free to post textures/images below of parts that you've done that are not in the stud.io official catalogue! I'll get around to making some of my own when I have time
(basically no Rock Raiders-unique parts are in the official catalogue)
Link to site: https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/partdesigner.page
2 quick, terrible examples:
Pasting textures onto pieces
Placing studs on pieces

The idea of this mod is to make LRR less annoying to play whilst still keeping that vanilla feel, in addition to enabling various lost content - and ensuring stability.
I'm well aware that this is not the first of its kind to be completed. Nevertheless, my goal is slightly different from those two:
a couple of long-standing bugs can be fixed
the goal is full compatibility with literally anything, adding as little as is possible
making the game less rage-inducing to play
I'm also aware of my previous mod, Monster's Revenge: however that had a much grander scope than this, and as a result it has been rather slow to make progress on. I have not forgotten it!
So, what does this do?
Highlights:
Better priorities
Less annoying monsters
most notably slugs
Better quality-of-life (notifications no longer reset game speed)
Enabled lost content
Pilot idle animations
Spiders, Snakes, and Scorpions
Less annoying level design
Recharge Seams
No rubble all the way on the other side of the map (Water Works, Hot Stuff)
Random landslides are entirely disabled
Images in spoilers:
A detailed list:
this bulletpoint won't go away
Future Work:
Tweaking remaining levels:
Adding Recharge Seams
Writing own slug scripts
Synchronised monster invasion for levels that deserve it (eg Lava Laughter, Rocky Horror)
This will probably be a separate mod
Levels 1 -> 10 are mostly unmodified, although these are the least broken ones
Erosion parameters
More parameter tweaking
Crystal cost of various vehicles
Nerfing Small Digger overpoweredness
Camera values need tweaking but Cyrem already did that in CE
It is designed to be used alongside Community Edition ( @Cyrem and perhaps included by default? ).
> Download! Put in your mods folder for Cafeteria and hit Enable.
Compatible with literally anything: that's its point.
Don't want Cafeteria or can't use it? I also made it for the Data Method (if you want to integrate it along your own mod) or the WAD method (if you just want to plug your WADs straight onto an installation and play). > Download!
This has not been entirely my own work, and several people contributed to this, even if they are unaware they did so:
@Slimy Slug explained the Build Power Path priority and also researched which other ones might be useful (=> none of them)
@Cirevam explained how to make monsters killable (in a thread long ago) and I also copied the erosion notification straight from Time Raiders
@Jessietail for getting me initially interested in Spiders, Snakes, and Scorpions long, long ago
@Cyrem for the fantastic forum, fantastic tools, and gobsmackingly amazing Community Edition

Similar to speed runs on certain games... Less for the system to manipulate I'm guess?
Similar to speed runs on certain games... Less for the system to manipulate I'm guessing?
Also I can try cafeteria on xp... I just got Baz mod started... But I can goof with a couple different setups if you need a system test

In the last couple days I've located a major cause of menu lag on Windows 10 which I intend to address in a version of Community Edition. You'll find the Japanese version exe runs smoother than standard Masterpiece Edition due to how it handles the drawing of text differently (Yes you can just wack the Jap exe in place of the English exe and it'll work just fine aside from the crammed text).
I've done basically no testing of Cafeteria on XP, so I have no idea how that would turn out.

GET HYPED! Wahooooo! Party time! :stro- aidenpons has been banned for strobe spamming
I highly recommend vanilla first. It is still surprisingly playable, even though some levels are a chore. There are ways and means around this though. Some generic pointers, and then spoiler'd level-specific general game abuse:
- If there's rubble on the far side of the map that your raiders want to clear (Hot Stuff and Water Works), just disable shovelling in the priorities. It's not a problem though: if you select a tile and click Clear Rubble that overwrites the disable and just that tile will be cleared.
- Any level with erosion becomes waaaay less annoying if you rearrange the priorities such that Ore is at the 9th and last slot. This is because "Shovel Power Path" is a priority hidden in-game that sits about 8 that also controls repairing erosion. If it's above Ore, raiders will shovel Power Paths; but if it's below, raiders will pick up ore instead of shovelling paths: and there's aaaaalways ore to pick up.
SPOILER WARNING!
That said, Community Edition is now a thing! But sometime I feel like playing in anything more than 640x480 ruins the feel of this game
Baz's Mod is also playable, although there are some really funny design decisions and some levels are just an absolute chore. However this is the only overhaul that is actually 'finished,' even if TBH I don't like it all that much (but that was because it was made a long time ago where map editing was still done with hex editors: it's excusable.)
Have a shameless plug for my half-baked 'monsters-will-smeck-your-base' mod, which is I'd say worth playing for a couple of levels there (Tunneled and Frozen Frenzy are my best ones there: The Marsh and Lava Laughter are also quite good IMO): but definitely finish playing vanilla through first. (I need to tidy this up into a more playable, drag-n-drop, state.... got much modding to do, but I also have many assignments to do )
You might also have fun with Hover Scout Upgrade, which you can reasonably run alongside vanilla (has minimal effects on gameplay aside from making many aspects less tedious as well as being a massive ore sink)
The Tunnel Transport can be enabled, however a) it's not needed in any levels (and thus won't help you out) and b) invariably breaks at some point in time.
High-Poly objects can also be installed but a) the LRR engine doesn't like oodles of polygons hanging around (the high-poly Teleport Pad is especially bad for this) and b) the low-poly sometimes gives the game its charm. High-Poly Rock Raiders is very good though.
Map-wise, I'd finish the game first, because a good deal of them overwrite a level / stuff up sounds / generally play up. Cafeteria makes the process significantly less painful however most modded levels don't have Cafeteria files. (A more up-to-date version of Cafeteria is included in Community Edition, but was playing up a little when disabling mods last time I checked) Those that do are usually worth installing, even if because doing so is easy.
I can highly reccomend alan's Cunning Canyons and Lavalanche, although don't read the second topic beyond the OP: contains spoilers!
I also create some maps: a lot are included in Monster's Revenge (which I already linked) but a couple of good standalones (in fact, the only ones I released as standalones )
are Ice Sanctuary, Xiron, and on a sadder note, Christchurch (which still makes me cry...). On a happier note, I also made Whack-A-Slug which can be fun to play around with
And of course there's Time Raiders, which is a massive (and incomplete) overhaul from file size alone, but it's such a total overhaul that I'd definitely recommend vanilla LRR first.
(Writing this has spurred me on to get started on a couple projects involving maps and Cafeteria... will get onto this when I don't have too many assignments due in too little time!)

Thanks, that's excellent!!
I'm spotting a hovercraft I've never seen before next to the computer and a monstrous vehicle in the table photo, like a scorpion-type Chrome Crusher. Also I love seeing those design buckets, it seems they actually went more according to the concept art in the beginning!
It would be so awesome to find some of those old prototypes...

Well folks.... I'm playing Rock Raiders!
After getting my Virtualbox set up, getting a windows xp sp3 iso, taking forever to set up the shared folder so I could transfer.... (blood pressure rising) D3drm.dll.... I just spent seriously like an hour and a half getting the shared folder to work between Linux Mint and Virtual Windows XP.... Just to transfer that one file over.... But with that... I'm managing my team on level 1 as we speak. Thank you all. I am actually really glad there are folks that still rock this game. You guys make this that much more worth it. Even if some of you RAM shame me ( jk jk...wait.. is ram shaming even a thing?).
With that said...
Any recommendations to upgrade this experience? Mods, extra levels, you name it! My wife just lost me for a while to this game

So I just found out that the Rock Raiders prototype images come from a 1999 book called "The Ultimate LEGO Book"and I got interested in reading the rest of the Rock Raiders pages but I can't find it online anywhere, apart from the 3 well known prototype images (Granite Grinder, Loader Dozer, Rock Monster attack. However I'd really like a close-up of the other images and prototype parts as well! Does anyone know if there possibly is a scan of the book where I can find a larger-scale version of these pages?
And also, if there are more prototype materials like this I'd really like to see it as I thought I had seen everything Rock Raiders until this morning when that Granite Grinder prototype jumped into my face
Here's a YouTube video showing the page in question, but at a very low resolution:

Nah, it's okay. Running LRR is extremely hit-and-miss: sometimes it works immediately, and... sometimes it doesn't. We're trying to help! (or at least I am, and I think Cyrem is )
It's okay, I was just wondering if that was actually 3 GB of RAM.
Good luck, Rock Raider!

Hold up.....
I just removed dgvoodoo from the game folder.... Turned off compatibility mode... And It loaded a ton faster... There's still a little lag. Gonna keep fiddling with it. Now I'm a super confused.... And feel like I've wasted a ton of everyone's time.
I'm curious if maybe it had to do with swapping the WAD or the change out of the LegoRR.exe ... and if that was all I had to do....
I'm trying other combinations with different compatibility modes and other things. I'll keep you posted.